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ConsenSys fintech exec says Libra could become a ‘developer magnet’ if the stablecoin project takes off

Lex Sokolin is worried that Libra could be detrimental to open-source crypto development in the long-run.

Sokolin, ConsenSys’s co-leader for fintech and DeFi, recently sat down with The Block’s Frank Chaparro and Ryan Todd for an episode of The Scoop. Conversation topics ranged from how Libra could be a tool that governments use to “fight back” against bitcoin, to stablecoin business models, to the latest developments at ConsenSys.

But one thing that Sokolin seemed particularly passionate about was his concern that Libra might become a “developer magnet” that wipes out the open-source decentralized software development scene (read: Ethereum). “Today there’s nowhere else, really, to develop decentralized software other than Ethereum,” he said.

Libra could change that because developers might jump at the chance to work on a platform that has “100,000x more in assets and users than in today’s networks,” Sokolin said. And if it ever goes live it will probably do so with an air of legitimacy in DC.

“If Congress says, ‘We are comfortable with Libra because we had all this input on it from a regulatory perspective, and that’s where we are going to trial our CBDC'—and then in addition to that you have the massive tech footprint of Silicon Valley, so you have billions of users potentially—that’s just going to be a huge developer suck,” Sokolin warned.